


Ten Views on a Tuesday Night

by RyMagnatar



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Fight Club-stuck, Gen, M/M, Violence, lots of mentions of blood, written before all the ancestors were brought in hence the lack of them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-03
Updated: 2012-11-03
Packaged: 2017-11-17 16:02:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/553353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RyMagnatar/pseuds/RyMagnatar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(If you've seen Fight Club, you're going to get this pretty quick. This is one of the fight nights told in ten different perspectives, all male in this case. )</p>
<p>You are the oppressed. You are the restless. You are the ones who come to fight. You are the ones who come to live. </p>
<p>You are the members of Fight Club.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ten Views on a Tuesday Night

***Tavros***

The smell of sweat and blood, the stink of male musk- human and troll alike- is so strong in this room that it even overpowers the smell of a cigarette burning in the lips of the man next to you. Your palms are damp, and your stomach churns, squeezing and twisting in on itself. You would probably vomit right now if there was anything in your stomach anymore, but you spent the whole afternoon racing to the bathroom (or alternatively the kitchen sink) as you came to grips with your choice for tonight.

Your hands shake badly. You squeeze them into tight fists at your side.

A man, not that young and not that old, is standing in the center, with his arms folded tight across his chest and his hands hidden under them.  His hair is black, cropped short on his head, and his blue eyes move over the men surrounding him with emotions you can barely identify. Is it pride that makes the corner of his lip twist up? Amusement that crinkles in the the corners of his eyes? Or is it disgust that so many trolls are here, that so many men are here, wanting- no, _needing-_ to attack each other in a semi-controlled place.

He opens his mouth, laughing dryly, “There’s a lot more of you here tonight. Seems like we have some trouble adhering to rules one and two.”

He begins to walk slowly around the circle and from his mouth drop the litany that was whispered to you not more than a month ago by your moirail- whispered like a prayer from between drugged lips.

“The first rule of fight club is: you do not talk about fight club. The second rule of fight club is: _you_ do not talk about fight club.” He stops turning, holds up his hand with three fingers up. You see the blood on his knuckles. It’s dried dark red. Human blood. “Third rule of fight club: someone yells stop, goes limp, taps out, the fight is over.”

You swallow dryly, and fold your hands behind your back the way you do at work to hide your nervousness. You can remember the words clearly enough from your memory that they blur in your head as this human speaks. Until, of course, the final rule.

It’s like he’s looking right at you as he says it, “...and final rule: If this is your first night at fight club,” Blue eyes meet your brown ones, “You _have_ to fight.”

The challenge burns inside of you, but instead of making you cower, you bring your hands back around to your side. You’re already shirtless, on the advice of your moirail, because messing with a shirt in public- with your bull horns getting in the way- was an embarrassment you couldn’t handle. Your heart hammers in your chest as you shuck off your shoes and step forward, hands tight fists at your side and looking around in your own challenge.

The man with dark hair, you wish you knew his name, looks at you in pride.

It’s the first time that a human has ever looked at you that way.

* * *

***Dirk***

You feel the hand press gently against your arm, the back of bare knuckles on your elbow, and shift your weight to your other side to make room. From behind you steps forward some man you remember from somewhere. You have to blink several times, to look at a face devoid of glasses, before you recognize those brilliant green eyes and that determined face.

Then he’s breaking the circle, tugging off his green shirt to reveal gorgeous tanned shoulders and pulling off his shoes and socks. You wonder who told him about this place. If you had known that he had any interest in something like this you would have done it. You find it in you to hate whomever it was that convinced him to show up. You twist around to look for that person. No one seems to be smiling overly much, though, except perhaps some spindly little four horned troll kid.                

He meets your gaze and you pull back your lip in a sneer.

Even if he isn’t the one that brought _him_ here, you want to grind his face into the ground.

Turning back to middle of the circle, the object of your affections is eyeballing that troll across from him. Bronze skinned human verses bronze blooded troll. You lick your lips and let your eyes slide down to his bare ankles, loving the tan line he’s gotten from his socks. It’s a weird thing to like, you know that, but it’s something you can live with.

Like the two in the circle, you await for the gesture from your leader. The hand drops like a chop through the air and with a shout they’re on each other.

Your heart rushes up to your throat and stays there, thundering, pounding, choking you for breath as you watch. A horn is grabbed, hair is pulled. A fist slams into a shoulder and an elbow digs into a stomach. They fall hard to the floor when the human you love makes the troll you don’t know lose his footing and land hard on his elbow.

The troll thrashes, twists and bends his waist in a way that makes yours ache in sympathy but then he has your love pinned to the ground and his fist is slamming into his face.

A tanned hand slaps the ground in the universal -literally- tapping out gesture. Just like that, the bronze blooded creature sits back, shoulder’s sagging, and the glittering metallic color of his eyes turn too dark with sudden relaxing pupils. He pulls back and helps up the bleeding, battered man that you long for. He grins, then makes a face and spits to the ground. A tooth lands on the concrete in a splatter of bronze.

There’s laughter, hands slapping backs and then they are absorbed back into the crowd. The circle is created once more and this time a tall, lanky troll with enormous hands, wild hair, who wore depraved face paint, and a slow, uneven smile, steps from the group. He looks at you and chuckles, soft and dark.

You forget your invented grudge against the four horned troll and step into the circle, abandoning shirt and shoes as you go.

* * *

***Sollux***

The feeling of relief that fills you up, even if it’s only briefly, when that human with the burning orange eyes steps into the ring without you, makes your knees go weak.

It isn’t your first time here, oh no, you’ve been coming for about three months now. You know the purpose of this is to let out anger, stress, to give relief in a way that isn’t allowed anywhere else, but you are careful who you go against. There are a few you stay back from, a few on a higher level. This human who had glared at you, silently challenged you, was one of them.

The indigo blooded troll he had stepped out to face was another. You preferred those around your level, those who were mostly psionic, though few were in this meeting. You preferred humans who looked fresh, who didn’t walk like a hunting cat or a trained killer. You preferred not getting your face any more horribly deformed than you were born with.

Perhaps those preferences made this kind of place the wrong kind sort for you, but even though you thrived on the contention brought about by words, and depended on your frail hands to make a living, you needed to be here.

You needed to watch this, to remember who and what you were a part of. You needed the violence outside of you to control the impulses inside of you. There were strict rules here. There was law here. Yet even with both of those, there was freedom. Freedom to bleed and break and scream. Freedom to be a beast and yet not quite.

You are swept into the shouting, again, as you always are, shouting wordlessly at times, shouting in favor of indigo, shouting in favor of flame eyes. You raise your fist and shout, and scream, and for once in your miserable, fucked up life, you feel at home, you feel at ease, you feel accepted.

You feel alive.

* * *

***Jake***

Sitting on a sack full of some sort of grain, and that sack on a barrel, you hold a cloth over your nostrils and watch the fight between two bodies. Your glasses were returned to you and sit propped up on the bridge of your nose to give you good vision once more.

You know that bloke who moves like the wind around that troll, who lashes with fists and feet. You know him from his spiky blond hair, the set of his jaw, and the strength you can see coursing through his muscles. You’ve never seen his eyes before, though.

They’re brilliant orange, gleaming like amber in the light in this basement, and steal your breath away.

The only thing that distracts you is the stirring of the troll beside you. The one you fought, who helped you up to your feet and who sat with you, he has large hands and big eyes and an easy smile- as though he’s unbothered by the missing tooth or the blood on his face.

Or at least, he was smiling. Now he sits with his shoulders hunched inwards, fists tight between his knees as he leans forward, watching. He breathes unevenly. His eyes watch the troll you don’t know and the human you do know, fight with an intensity unmatched by those around you.

“You know him?”

The words are soft, and out of your mouth before you can stop yourself. There wasn’t any rule against speaking, but you haven’t seen anyone else doing so and _this_ was your first time…

He looks at you, blinks in surprise and then nods, “The troll in there is my best friend.” He pauses, as though he’s considering his words, “My moirail.”

“Oh,” you know the term. It’s kind of hard not to know the term, along with the other three. You have been educated in them, in accordance to government regulated education systems, just as you have been taught many structures of troll society. They have been offered the same except about human romance, but sometimes you meet trolls who don’t know, or even more frequently, meet trolls who don’t know what you know about their quadrants. It’s confusing and messy and makes you wrinkle your nose in distaste. There had to be a better way. “He brought you here?”

“Said it would be good for me, a change that would help me,” he’s looking back at the fighters now. He doesn’t take his eyes off them. It lasts much longer than your fight did. The one that makes your body tremble slightly still. You had thought you were in great shape, but apparently not enough against a troll. The blonde you know, but not quite, is holding his own against the troll with surprising ease- even if there are deep scratches down his back.

“I didn’t know that trolls would be here,” You find yourself saying without really thinking about it, “I’ve been taught that usually trolls are against any sort of multiples in quadrants and, I don’t know, this seems very black to me.”

He shakes his head slightly. “It isn’t. It’s not about hatred or your rival or anything like that.” His voice takes a revered, an awed tone even, “It’s about … it’s about pride.”

“Pride?”

“Yes,” he replies stronger now, “Pride in who we are. Who we can be.”

He’s grinning now and suddenly pushes himself to his feet. You watch as he joins the shouting crowd and in seconds, his voice is louder than others as he shouts, fists upraised.

Tilting your head to the side, you lower the cloth from your face and look down at it. It has red human blood, bronze, yellow, green, blue all the way up to violet on it- from one drop in color to a whole smear of another. None of it is fresh, but your own. The cloth is stained these colors.

“More than pride,” you murmur, “Unity.”

* * *

***Gamzee***

In the back of your mind, when you chose to remember the dreams you have and the things whispered to you in your dreams, there was a time when you didn’t have such constraint.

Bowed head. Lowered eyelids. Loose hands. Slouched shoulders. Bent knees to lower your height. All so you can fade away in a building, in a crowded street, so you aren’t a towering beast of fear- so you aren’t what you were born to be- there was a time when you were supposed to fade for different reasons.

There was a time when you were not only permitted to, but encouraged, to crush skulls and enforce laws with brain jelly between your fingers and entrails underfoot. A time when true rib bones were used in the decoration of your clothing, where teeth were strung together for necklaces and sun-bleached skulls with gleaming horns were a necessity in your hive, not just an eccentricity.

In the back of your mind you are told that there was once a time where you fought alongside your brethren, but you also fought with them. You fought them to be stronger, to make them stronger, to cull the weak, to unify in blood and pain a bond that could only be torn apart through death.

And then there is this place.

The low ceiling isn’t so low that you have to hunch over. Every man and troll in here walks with chin up, shoulders back, with power in their limbs and in acknowledgement of the blood in their veins. Fear is driven out with the pounding of fists. Pride is imprinted with scars. New brothers are baptized in with blood and pain.

Man and troll stand together where they belong, testing and re-testing each other. Even now you try to get your hands on this slip of human flesh; you desire to teach him, or to be taught by him.

He is a blur of energy and fire, but he drips blood where your claws have gotten him. You can watch him; you can smell his movements in the air, even though the scent of blood, of violence, of the scent of _man_ and _male troll_ is powerful here. You catch him again and again. He kicks your ribs, slams at your face, jumps off your legs, and swings over your arms.

You know that if you were any other setting, if you were not among your brothers, if this human attempted this in the light of day, to try and best you outside of this ritual, that you would lust after him with hatred so black it omitted the light of even the brightest sun.

Instead, you laugh as he fights with you, and he laughs as you fight him, and as you feel his arm tighten around your throat and his growling in your ear, as your claws reach back and tear at his pants, his leg, threatening to rip open his sides- but not digging in too deep to actually do so- and you smile.

This man is your brother, you think as you sink to your knees. This man is born of blood and pain as you were, you reach a hand down and pat the ground.

This man has won, this time, but next time it might be different.

* * *

***John***

Dave has been quiet tonight.

You try not to think too hard about that, about him.

It’s difficult not to.

He leans back against a support beam, eyes covered with sunglasses that reflect the world around and give nothing in return. After his recitation of the rules, and the beginning of the first match, he has stepped back. Others step in and out to fight while he watches them.

And while you watch him.

You look at how perfectly composed he is and you think that tonight you’re one step closer to crazy. Unwillingly, you think about Rose, and how she looks at you, how she talks to him through you. It makes you sick, makes you teeter on the edge of what is and what isn’t in the present.

He glances over to you, smirks again like he did before, back when he recited the rules he made up. Tilts his chin up, the light flashes over his glasses, and the smirk broadens to show his white, flat teeth. You wonder if he’s going to fight tonight. You wonder why he opened up the ranks to both species. You wonder what Rose would say if she saw you staring at another man like this.

You roll one shoulder in a shrug and dismiss her from your thoughts formally. You don’t need to think about her any more than you do already outside of this place. You should focus on the fighting here. The indigo blooded troll has long since surrendered. Now, instead, a pair of teal bloods savage each other, tearing and ripping and rolling on the ground until one screeches for the other to stop.

The flattened cardboard box on the ground is replaced at a wave of Dave’s hand and in the minute afterwards, some humans go out and begin to brawl, they go from punching to grappling to wrestling on the floor until one taps out.  You’re drawn into it again, leaning forward, breathing heavily. What draws everyone else here is a mystery to you, but for you this is an outlet you could never give up.

You lick your lips and hear a soft chuckle. Glancing out of the corner of your eye you see Dave looking at you, or at least his face is pointed in your direction. You stare back at him and he just laughs again.

It isn’t with shame that you turn your gaze from him, looking to the crowd. No, not shame. It’s need.

You need to find someone to fight.

You need to beat Dave out of your head, if only for a few minutes.

* * *

***Equius***

Even in this place, where violence is encouraged, not only expected, you must restrain yourself.

The only difference here was is in the way you had to restrain yourself.

Outside of this seemingly oppressive basement, where darkness lingers just beyond the crowd and the presence of so many bodies so close together would make anyone’s sensibilities jangle like the alarms on an experimental robot, is where the true oppression is.

Here, though, here is a world that thrives on anonymity, not just in name but in color of blood. Here, brown stands with red stands with violet. Here, indigo lives up to its strength and terror, but olive green recoils with a grace and power that can send even the longest living indigo sprawling in agony. Here, humans shed shirts with trolls, eyeball them from across a blood spattered circle and break the teeth of trolls twice their size.

Here, all the things you have been schoolfed over the years come to a halt at the door and crumble under the burning blue gaze of your leader as he leans against a support beam and watches, surveys the gathering. Here, perhaps, you can find a purpose truly worthy of throwing your support behind.

You yourself hardly fight. If you do, it is against higherbloods than yourself, indigo or violet if you can. Otherwise, you stick to pulling apart combatants. It’s a job that needs doing and one you are happy to do. In return, you get that cool blue gaze of acknowledgement, that glimmer of pride in the corner of his eyes and you feel pride in yourself.

For once, despite your unnatural strength, despite the looks you have gotten all your life, the disgust that others have deemed your due, you are accepted.

You know he is human, you know it in the color of his skin, the flatness of his teeth, or the warmth of his hand. You know it more powerfully than you know the curling warmth of your moirail in your lap, that he is human, of red blood and short life.

But when those blue eyes burn and look out across the room, when they look at you, even if it’s just for a moment, you pretend he is the most noble of highbloods, and you bend yourself to his will gladly.

* * *

***Bro***

Perhaps you aren’t supposed to, but you’re working your way through the ranks of color and keeping a tally of it at home.

You have a strip of paper taped to the back of your door where you press your knuckle against it to smear the blood of whomever you smashed down. Last time you finally managed to wrangle and defeat an indigoblood. This week your goal is something higher.

This week you’re searching for violet.

This isn’t your normal night out. You’re only here because you’ve heard that a seadweller comes out on these nights. You’ve seen more indigos, as the months wear on, but seadweller is still rare. You wonder why. You wonder a lot of things and none of them aloud.

You’re on your third cigarette by the time that the violetblood steps forward. He’s impressive, but perhaps only so because he’s the truly unique member of this club. His purple fins flare out around his neck, rich with color and so you know they’re rich with blood. You admire the zigzag shape of his horns, his strong shoulders and the deep grey-purple of his skin. There’s a dark bruise around one eye and what looks like stitches on his upper arm but otherwise he seems so healthy. His bare feet move forward onto the cardboard and he digs at it with the claws on his toes.

He looks around the circle, sneering, challenging, wordlessly, with his hands at his sides, palms facing out. _Look at me,_ he says with his hands, _so harmless_. But there is sharpness in his eyes you recognize.

You might not have your badge with you, or your cuffs, but those are only the accoutrements of your job. You don’t need them to be able to read _I am a killer_ in his eyes.

The hesitation around you, from the whole crowd, only lets you know that you’re not the only one who can see that this troll has taken a life before. You take one last drag of your cigarette before you drop it to the ground and crush it under your heel.

You yank your shirt up off over your head in one smooth movement and toss it back. You slide out of your shoes and flex your toes, stretch your ankles with a roll, and grin. The violetblood grins back at you, teeth as sharp as a sharks, and flexes.

In any other time, you would take a moment to admire those arms, to lick your lips and lower your glasses and see if he wanted you to take him to bed. (That’s the other blood color list you have, just so you get everything you can out of this godforsaken world. But in that one you’re only up to navy.)

And maybe afterwards, if he lingers a while, and you still have the energy, you’ll see what you can get out of him. But for now you slide one foot back and lift one hand up and you take your glasses off your head. You toss them back over your shoulder where you know they will be caught, and you level your gaze on this violetblood.

To your great pleasure, he doesn’t wait a second more before he lunges at you.

* * *

***Eridan***

To say this was your first human to fight would be a false statement.

To say this was a fight for your life would also be a false statement.

To say this was a time that you had to win would be a false statement that would make you laugh yourself silly.

If there is anything that this place, this _club,_ has taught you, it is how to lose.

How to get beaten down by sheer will, sheer strength, sheer anger, and then how to tap your hand or shout that you’re beaten. Fancy footwork will only get you so far, you realized after a few times showing up. Most of these idiots didn’t know how to fight professionally, they weren’t caught, trained and taught like you were, bred for and sent to the military- even if they were trolls. They weren’t like you.

They didn’t have the expectations that you did and at first that made you hate them. Hate them for having such easy lives, for living so simply, for not needing to do the things in their life that you had had to do without much choice. Sure, there were parts that you would have never given up, like the way the heiress had cupped your cheek gently, or the way the academy had awarded you highest honors upon your graduation, but at the same time-

At the same time you yearned to know what it was like to have people around you who cared for your welfare, even if they hardly knew you. You had not spent so much time in human company, there had been no _reason_ to.

And then you had shattered your leg during your work for the military and, in true Alternian fashion, you were given two choices: honorable discharge and culling, or dishonorable discharge and exile to Earth.

You, selfish, prideful you, had wanted to live.

You were young, so young, only sixty sweeps or so, and you wanted to breathe and run and swim and fly through space and you were furious that the help you got was barely enough to heal. You drained your accounts dry to try and walk again.

Now, twenty sweeps later, you were walking, running, fighting on the leg that tore you from your future and you were furious. You were angry at the world, angry at yourself, and full of a burning, throbbing anger that drove you to wilder and wilder attempts to calm it. It drove you here.

For the first time since you were in the academy, you were in among people- humans and trolls- that you felt you could rely on, if only for two things.

You could rely on them to beat you down and you could rely on them to be beaten down.

Tonight, for the first time in a long time, you face down a human your height. When he stepped from the crowd, shades shining on his face and a smirk on his lips, you had focused your gaze on his face. You would ignore the shift of skin over muscle. This place wasn’t a place to find someone to fuck, this place was a place to get some relief from the fury that itched under your skin. (You were worried that fighting soon wasn’t going to be enough, soon you would need _more_ , but until then you would fight and fight.)

Then he had removed his shades, looked at you with nearly red eyes, and something inside of you clenched too tightly to let you breathe.

It was only after he gestured you to attack him, and that you allowed yourself to see beauty in his strength, in his human-ness, that you were able to attack him.

You had little hope in defeating him, and little desire to as well.

Yet that was alright.

You could survive with losing, one more time.

* * *

***Karkat***

From the very first match, you knew that-

No wait a minute, if you were going to be despairing, you might as well do it properly.

From the moment that dark haired man opened his mouth to talk, to give the rules, you felt an iron lump grow in your belly and a voice in your head that could only be your aggravating future-self whispering, _You are really, really going to regret this, you know._

You shouldn’t have come; you shouldn’t have listened to the taunts of someone you barely knew, who wasn’t even here tonight, and shown up alone.

Because now you had to fight.

Now you had to _bleed._

Your pulse was running away from you and your breath was a scrabbling creature in terror in your throat and all you could think about were how many eyes, how many trolls, how many humans, were going to see your mutant blood and cull you right there on the spot.

Tonight was the night of your execution and you were not ready in the least.

But you had come too far into the room, had gotten too far away from the stairs and all you could do now was hunker in the shadows in the back and pretend not to be there. You wanted to scream at yourself for being so fucking _stupid_ for doing this. You spent several fights with your hands over your face, crouched down in the dark and trying not to scream.

Maybe they wouldn’t notice you, you told yourself in horrified hope, if you were small enough and it was dark enough, maybe they wouldn’t-

But then a hand gripped your wrist and pulled you up to your feet and you were looking into piercing blue eyes and a voice was distantly saying, “It’s your first time. You have to fight.”

The strength to resist pooled out of you under that gaze and you were led to the circle. Terror filled you but as you stood there your hands worked without you. They pulled your shirt up, threw it aside. You bent over and pulled off your boots. You regretted this more with each passing second. You shivered under their gazes.

If only they knew- if only they _knew_.

_Soon they will,_ that horrible voice in your head that sounded just like you, just tired and old, _Soon they will and you won’t even live long enough to become me._

The one who stripped his shirt off in front of you was the same who dragged you from the shadows, the same that spoke the ritualistic rules, and the same who appeared to be the leader.

He cracked his knuckles. He looked at you.

Met your gaze and grinned and said, “Come on, man. Bring it.”

Something lurched inside of you. If you couldn’t escape your death, at least you could go out well known! It made a twisted laugh coil up from your chest but you killed it before it escaped.

Instead, you attacked.

Desperately, full of terror, you attacked him, fought him, took glancing blows and snarled as he reached for you. You drew his blood first, warm and dark red- turning darker as it dried, as it seeped into the cardboard below- but then his fist collided with your breastbone and you went cross eyed as your heart skipped a beat or twelve.

You didn’t feel the punch to the mouth as it sent you stumbling back, but the blood that gushed from your nose was more than enough to let you know that it had done its work.

It was also more than enough to make everyone stand rigid in the room, to draw out the breath of each other member there. Even the humans, even the goddamn humans with their terrible schoolfeeding programs, knew there were only twelve shades of troll blood. Twelve shades and then the dark red of human that was near enough to rustblood that you could mistake one for another at a glance.

Twelve shades and then _you_ , you miserable excuse for a troll with stunted horns and candy blood that flowed down your face and onto your chest, heedless of your hand trying to stop it.

The human who downed you seemed to understand, and understand it quicker than the others. He gulped down a breath and then looked around the room. “What is the first rule of fight club?”

“Don’t talk about fight club!” came the immediate response.

“And the second rule?” He spun around to look at the other side of the room.

“You do not talk about fight club!” was the chorus.

Then he looked at you and he said solemnly, “If we adhere to these rules, the rules that make sense to us, the rules that include us _all_.” He paused and looked about, meeting gazes over your head, “If we all obey the rules that we all know, that give us what we need,” he stops turning and looks down at you, meeting your gaze with such a ferocity it makes you swallow in attempt to wet your mouth, “then not one of us need to do something foolish and jeopardize us all. You understand? If we are not together, then we are not worth a damn.”

He nodded, turning his back to you.

You sit in silence. Then someone with strong hands lifts you up to your feet. You meet a troll with a deep navy gaze and then on your other side is a human with a lopsided smile and a rag. You take the rag to cover the blood from your nose.

A shadow looms over you and when you look up, the dark eyes of a tall indigo look down at you in fondness. “Welcome, brother,” his voice rumbles in his chest and he lightly grinds his knuckles into your shoulder in a greeting.

In utter astonishment, you glance to the human with dark hair and piercing blue eyes and you wonder ( _not for the only time,_ future-you comments idly) just what the fuck his plan will be.

Raising an army in the basements around the city, emboldening fighters in the alleys of towns, unifying men from county to county- you only did that sort of thing if you needed an army.

So what was his army for?

**Author's Note:**

> I really hope ya'll got the thing with Dave and John here....


End file.
